Quotes

You can often tell a lot about a person from the company he or she keeps.

Below are some of my favourite quotes, covering marketing and life.

“The union of the mathematician with the poet, fervour with measure, passion with correctness, this surely is the ideal.” - William James

“We used to reach a million to affect a thousand.  … … However the opportunity [now] exists to build conversations and realationships with the thousand people we originally wanted to affect in the first place.”  John Willshire.

“Good design can’t fix broken business models.” -  Jeffrey Veen

“Buying space in someone else’s brain is far harder than buying space in someone else’s media etc etc.” - Hugh Macleod.

“The perfect is the enemy of the good” - Voltaire

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair.

The value of iterative action, instead of endless theorising:
“Prototypes over powerpoint” - BBH Labs’ blog.

“It’s only when you hitch your wagon to something larger than yourself that you realize your true potential.”  - Barack Obama (before he was President), found via top bloke joelaz.

On the virtue of fighting the good fight:

“My grandfather was a painter. He died at age 88. He illustrated Robert Frost’s first two books of poetry. He was looking at me one day and he said, `Harry, there’s two kinds of tired. There’s good tired and there’s bad-tired. Ironically enough, bad-tired can be a day in which you won, but you won other people’s battles, you lived other people’s days, other people’s agendas and dreams, and when it’s all over, there’s very little you in there, and when you hit the hay at night, you toss and turn, you don’t settle easy.

Good tired, ironically enough, can be a day in which you lost, but you knew you fought your battles, you chased your dreams, you lived your days. And when you hit the hay at night, you settle easy, you sleep the sleep of the just, and you can say, “Take me away.”

Harry, all my life I wanted to be a painter. So I painted. God, I would have loved to have been more successful. But I painted and painted. And I am good tired, and they can take me away.” ”

- Harry Chapin - found over at Michael Gartenberg.

On the mistaking of fluff and spin and soundbites for substantive thought and analysis and discussion:

Jed Bartlet in The West Wing (best show ever) -  “That’s the ten word answer my staff’s been looking for for two weeks. There it is. Ten word answers can kill you in political campaigns. They’re the tip of the sword. Here’s my question: What are the next ten words of your answer? Your taxes are too high? So are mine. Give me the next ten words. How are we going to do it? Give me that, I’ll drop out of the race right now. Every once in a while… every while, there’s a day with an absolute right and an absolute wrong, but those days almost always include body counts. Other than that, there aren’t very many unnuanced moments in leading a country that’s way too big for ten words. I’m the President of the United States, not the President of the people who agree with me. And by the way, if the left has a problem with that, they should vote for somebody else.